Now we have Microsoft Live, does that mean that their old products should be re-branded Microsoft Dead?

This is one of the excellent lines spoken by Marc Benioff, the CEO & Chairman of Salesforce.com, at their European launch of Winter 06 and AppExchange today at the Portman Hotel in London.  It's the first time I've seen him speak in the flesh, and he is certainly a very direct and straight talking individual, commanding the stage and interjecting in to the presentations on several occasions.  He had plenty to say disparaging Oracle, SAP and Siebel for their lack of understanding of the new paradigm, or as he calls it "The End of Software".  By the way, have you seen the great game they've created on their site to attract disaffected Siebel employees - it's akin to the arcade game where you wallop an animal on the head - go have a look.

The session started with a US TV interview of writer and journalist Thomas Friedman explaining that we are at the "Mother of all turning points".  His argument is that the combination of the digital age of the PC, the new world of the Internet, and the availability of workflow software has flattened the World and created the Business Web.  This must be one of the threads in his recent book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, which also covers globalisation and the after affects of 9/11.  At one stage he commented that "geeky guys are predicting this is the end of Microsoft", and after the recording Benioff professed to be one of those geeky guys, and agreed that's what he would be doing today!

The rest of the session presented the latest flavour of Salesforce.com and a number of customers explaining how they are using it, and partners demonstrating their add-on applications that are available through AppExchange.  They are trying to make this platform like an iTunes or eBay for applications, both in terms of a development platform for partners, as well as a distribution mechanism to get their products to market.  They even managed to have one of the demonstrators online by webcam and web demo from his base in South India.  I'm sure the organisers were relieved when that worked!

There were some very good demonstrations of how you can integrate Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that have a proper web API, with other applications with a web API, such as Google maps.  These are called mashups, and they can look seamless to the user, as well as being inexpensive to do. 

Overall the key message was strong.  The world of SaaS, or as they call it "no software" is definitely upon us and the old guard better watch out.
Technorati Tags : Business 2.0, Web 2.0, SaaS, Salesforce.com, Benioff, Friedman, Oracle, Siebel, SAP, iTunes, eBay, mashup, on demand, ASP

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